1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a system and method for providing information and more particularly to an improved index that classifies links according to previously categorized data resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
The invention was designed to address the problems that e-business strategy and design consultants have in gathering information to be assessed and analyzed to develop e-business strategies for their external clients. For example, a substantial portion of engagement hours were being consumed by gathering informationxe2x80x94instead of assessing and analyzing it.
Prior to the invention, the process of gathering information was very ad hoc in nature; consultants would scour the Web, proprietary research sources, internal databases and use personal contacts to gather recent robust information relevant to their needs. There was no method or common tool that would be the single point of entry to such sources, nor was there a clear understanding of an efficient, best practice method of gathering such data, nor was it obvious as to what information (when found) could be applied to areas of a deliverable. A xe2x80x9cdeliverablexe2x80x9d is an end document or product required by a customer. Consultants therefore found their own methods to gather information and used their own favorite search tools and their own organization capabilities to help relay the information to the project team.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that organizes the resources available to e-business strategy and design consultants to reduce the amount of time such consultants spend gathering information and also to provide a system that furnishes the most current form of the resources in question. The invention described below addresses this problem and provides a novel system and method to reduce the time consultants spend gathering information.
The invention has many goals, including affording a user a tool that enables critical speed to important data, providing a standard method/process for gathering information for e-business strategy engagements, providing a single point of entry to relevant, recent and robust documents and data applicable to e-business strategy engagements, adding value to the research gathering process by organizing the search criteria around standard corporate methods and client deliverables, supporting consultants with intelligent software to aid in targeting their search process, and providing the consulting team a networked space to maintain interesting documents until they become applicable to their analysis.
In one embodiment, the invention comprises a method of searching a computerized network of databases containing documents using a web crawler. The web crawler is provided with conceptual guidelines before the searching. The invention summarizes and performs text clustering on the summaries to produce classifications. The text clustering is performed using seeds based on the conceptual guidelines. The invention then provides, through a user interface, the classifications and a query entry to search the classifications and directs (in response to the query entry) the user to one or more of the classifications, such that the user is directed to the classifications (and hyperlinks to the documents) and the user is not provided the documents themselves.
The invention hyperlinks to the documents in place of providing the documents. The summaries are based upon extensible markup language tags associated with the documents. Links to each of the documents may appear in at least two classes of the classifications. The invention identifies intersections of multiple classes that each respond to a user search. Such intersections represent occurrences of different classes which separately return links to a single document in response to the user search. The conceptual guidelines refine the searching and the text clustering to direct the classifications to a specific result.
Still, there are additional advantages for the consultant in using the invention (which is sometimes referred to herein as xe2x80x9cHub Content Management Toolxe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9cHCMTxe2x80x9d or simply xe2x80x9cHubxe2x80x9d) including providing access to proprietary research sources currently expensive to purchase on an individual basis, providing close adherence to the e-business strategy methodology to enable a clear understanding of what is being researched and what needs to be recovered, providing automated taxonomical representations of the data that enables discovery during the search process that would otherwise take hundreds to thousands of hours of intensive reading efforts, and finally storing links to documents, rather than the entire document itself, to afford the user confidence in access to recent information as deemed true by the original source and not the system administrator.
Such advantages contribute to the ultimate benefit, which is that the time spent researching for quality information is dramatically reduced by the technology used in the invention to organize and present the information to the user, specifically around the way consultants work.